Best known for his screen adaptations of The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008) Sir David Hare is a highly respected playwright who has been named as one of the fifty most influential Britons of the last fifty years by The Sunday Times. He is also a director who made television films in the seventies, three features in the eighties and recently a trilogy of films for the BBC starring Bill Nighy. The three films, which examine the role of the security services and big business in the War on Terror, began with Page 8 (2011) and when I met him recently at his Hampstead writing studio he had just completed post-production on the last two - Turks and Caicos and Salting the Battlefield (both 2014). I started by asking about his early life. He credits the sheer dullness of his upbringing in Bexhill-on-Sea for inspiring him to write. “I was in a suburb that was incredibly boring so I was thrown back on my imagination” he tells me, while also acknowledging his Scottish mother’s emphasis on education and her drive to give him “a life she did not have”. His father worked on P&O liners and was often absent. Hare describes him as “anti-Semitic and racist - his politics were extreme right wing,” but he rejects the notion that his writing, which is often avowedly political and left leaning, has been a response to his father. He does concede that “there was a lack of love in our family and there was a sense that it was incomplete, and when my father did come home he was totally uninterested in us.” Hare found solace in the cinema, catching every film shown at the Playhouse Cinema in Bexhill, but he was also regularly seeing his mother perform with an amateur dramatics group that boasted a young Julie Christie among its members. Hare, who was, by his own estimation, “very precocious,” won a scholarship place at Lancing College and he has said in the past that he had to alter his accent to fit in. I try to argue that his exposure to a class-bound institution might have influenced his approach to writing character but the suggestion falls on stony ground. However, when I suggest that nobody writes about a certain kind of English ruthlessness like he does (Ian McKellan’s speech about how to rise through the ranks of the Foreign Office in Plenty (1985) is a good example) he assigns this to his time at the posh private school. Studying Literature at Cambridge he embraced an art which professors like FR Leavis dismissed as “stupidity”. “In the 60s cinema wasn’t just at the cutting edge of art, it was at the cutting edge of thinking. The people I loved: Louis Malle, (Ingmar) Bergman, (Michelangelo) Antonioni, (Federico) Fellini, (Jean-Luc) Godard - they were the great thinkers in Europe.” Later Hare helped set up the radical Portable Theatre Company, embarking on a career that has led to The Guardian calling him “The finest living British dramatist”. But things might have taken a very different turn. After leaving university, director Tony Richardson offered him a job as fourth assistant director on a forthcoming biopic of Che Guevara – a project that collapsed. “You needed luck,” he concludes, “and I didn’t have any luck.” It is a surprising admission from someone who might be thought of as primarily a creature of the theatre but it becomes increasingly clear, as we talk, that he adores the cinema, though he is certainly not complacent about the difficulties of directing and is candid about past failures. Regarding his film Strapless (1989), he observed that film directors’ careers are often U shaped, adding that the film represented, for him “The bottom.” “The question will be ‘will you ever climb back up the other side?’ and so I went 20 years without making any films.” When I asked if he would prefer to be remembered for his films or his plays he laughed heartily. “It’s like saying ‘what do you want to die of?’ – you’re not going to have any choice”. That said there was no doubt in my mind, by the end of our conversation, which of the two arts claimed his heart. At one point he remarked: “If I see a cinema with the name of my film on it, I’m just incredibly excited and I’m still excited at the age of 65 which is ridiculous. I don’t think you ever lose that if you have a deeply provincial childhood.”

A.P. Reading your plays and watching your films has been refreshing because your work is not just a distraction, you engage with the times. D. H. The thing that’s important to me is the subject matter. The American actors in Turks and Caicos would say, “In America this script wouldn’t be possible”. I said, “Don’t be ridiculous, I thought American television was meant to be living through a golden period,” and they said, “Yes it’s living through a golden period stylistically but not in terms of content.” So there will be a series about what it’s like to be Vice President but it wont be about what Vice Presidents are actually, in the real world, dealing with and in particular the moral dilemmas that come out of The War on Terror are just a ‘no no’ either in the movies or on television. A.P. You are in the very privileged position of being able to move between film and theatre… D.H. The reason I wrote Page 8 (2011) was that I finally had the courage to spend a year writing something that might or might not be made. If I write a play I know it will go on. As I get older, I get scared that I’m going to waste time on something that doesn’t get made – it’s a complete waste of my time. So I finally said, “I’m going to have one last throw of the dice and I’m going to write an original film”. I hadn’t written an original film since Strapless. A.P. When you sat down to write Page 8 you really didn’t know that it was gong to be made? D.H. I showed it to Christine Langan, who was running BBC Films, and Christine said “You can either now spend two or three years with us, raising the money, and you having to listen to the views of all the partners, or if we do it for television we can be filming in six months time, so I made what I call an actuarial calculation and decided to be filming. A.P. I wanted to ask about how you develop characters. You’ve said in the past that at Lancing College you had to adjust your accent and I had this idea that maybe that gave you an insight into how characters are constructed... D.H. Not really. I think that when I started writing people struggled, actors struggled with the idea that my characters were different people according to who they were with. In other word; I’m a different person when I’m dealing with my mother, I’m another person when I’m dealing with the bank manager, I’m a completely different person when I’m talking to actors. It seems to me clear that we’re all many people. A.P. When you’ve decided on your subject and who your characters are – do you then start blocking out – doing the heavy lifting and creating a story line or do you start writing scenes? D.H. I start writing scenes. A.P. Which is against everything that every book will tell you about how to write a screenplay… D.H. If I’m adapting something then I will work out what the story is and then I will hang the dialogue on at the last minute. But with my own work, I want the freedom to go where the work leads me. A.P. So surely that must lead you into writing a lot of scenes that take you off in the wrong direction. D.H. Yup. A.P. But for you it’s essential to let the characters live and speak… D.H. I had a brilliant script editor (on Turks and Caicos). I need somebody to talk to. I don’t in the theatre, but in the films I do and you have to be able to argue out where they’re going. Now obviously when I work with Scott Rudin, Scott is the person I do that with because I think he’s the most brilliant developer of a screenplay alive. I don’t think there’s anyone to touch him. A.P. When you are directing your own screenplay do you give yourself more rehearsal time and use it as a writing tool? D.H. In an ideal world the writer should plainly be there at rehearsal because the minute you have a great actor they will show you what you need and what you don’t need and so why would you not go to a Meryl Streep rehearsal? Or a Christopher Walken rehearsal? Because the minute Chris says your words, you know what you need and what you don’t need and he will say to you, “I don’t really need that because I can imply that,” and so the craziness is not to be at the rehearsal. But if you’re only the writer it’s a very tiring way of life because you basically have to go out to bloody Pinewood at eight o’clock in the morning, attend the rehearsal and your day is ruined. I find the changes that you make on the day the most satisfying part of filmmaking. I love it. A.P. The changes you make on the day when you’re actually shooting? D.H. Yes – or when an actor comes to you and says, “You know I feel I should have something in this scene where I…” you know – and those bits that you write on the spot are deeply satisfying – they’re lovely, you know you sort of go: “I woke up without even knowing I’d have that idea and now its in the can and its perfect because an actor brought it to my attention.” A.P. I thought the acting styles of the British and American actors in Turks and Caicos were meshed together beautifully. I wondered what your attitude to improvisation was. D.H. I suppose I would crudely say what I do stand for - I mean I am very aware that two of the most conspicuous films of this year are The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle and both are plainly improvised by the actors - and when people say the Wolf of Wall Street has the word “fuck” 520 times, I know, from experience, that when you ask actors to improvise they tend to use the word “fuck”, and that’s why it appears 520 times. Clearly that kind of acting is the very opposite of the kind of acting that I admire and so I’m very deliberately not using those kinds of American actors who come to the set and expect to improvise and say something close to the line. I’m insisting that the actors say exactly the line because I want the whole thing to be an ensemble and I want the English to belong with the American. Look, I admire improvisation as a technique. In other words if you spend six months, as Mike Lee does or John Cassavetes did, that will achieve an effect of style that is very very satisfying, but if you throw an actor onto a film set and say, “Can you please just say whatever comes into your head”… you know…I think that kind of belief that if the actor makes the line up on the day it’s going to be more real also leads to a very generalized kind of acting that is not precise and I really, I don’t really know how to say this tactfully so maybe I wont say it tactfully, but I think some of the worst acting I have seen this year is in American Hustle. I think they’re four very bad performances. And I’m absolutely astonished that they’re nominated for Oscars. Because they’re all very good actors who are in my view doing their worst work, by a kind of sloppy generalizing. They’re rotten performances. A.P. You’re collaborations with Stephen Daldry have been particularly fruitful – has Stephen influenced you in the way that you’ve directed? D.H. Oh yeah - I don’t think I’d have gone back to directing… I think that in the eighties, as I sensed that I was getting worse, I became more and more defensive and more and more, “I am the author of this film”. Stephen is the most collegiate director I know - I mean to a fault. In other words I will kind of say to him, “Stephen we don’t have to ask the caterers what they think of the script you know, we do not have to go through the caterers! Because he literally will ask anyone their opinion and he is completely un-defensive, so it’s wonderful for me and I learned that you’re not, as a film director, doing that awful thing called “protecting your vision” - what you’re doing is opening out your vision. It’s having the confidence to listen to everybody and everybody will then contribute creatively. A.P. There’s talk now of cinema breaking into two because the 200 million dollar blockbusters are such big spectacles that when people go to the cinema it’s seen as ridiculous that you pay the same price to go and see that film as you do to see something that cost two or three million - do you see any danger in that? D.H. I just think that the whole...I mean it’s silly to say the game is up but certainly the properly financed serious film is now an endangered form. You know we made The Hours and The Reader - both of them cost 20 – 25 million dollars, both of them did what you dream of, which is you break out – you get out of the art house, although they are art house subjects, and you go into the mainstream and you take over a 100 million dollars. So everyone takes home 50 million dollars, but the studios have now decided that that’s not enough and that they’re only interested in taking home 300 million dollars. A.P. I guess the whole way people view things is changing so fast. D.H. Totally, I mean there was a ridiculous thing in the paper where somebody said - a film writer said, “It’s very hard to understand why David Hare, who can do anything he wants in theatre or film, is wasting his time on television,” and you just go, “This person doesn’t get it, they haven’t noticed that the world has changed over the last 25 years and I think changed for good – I don’t mean for better, I mean for ever. A.P. I read somewhere that you watch a lot of films. D.H. I now keep a diary of my film watching activity and its 250 – 260 films a year. I watch a film most days. My wife and I love to watch a DVD at 6 or 7 in the evening. I just happen to be married to somebody who loves the cinema as much as I do and so we love watching a film. I still don’t think of it as my profession, whereas going to the theatre is a bit of a torment to me - a duty – and I don’t really enjoy it as much as I enjoy watching the movies.

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Adam Preston
wrote the screenplay for the feature film Hangar 10 which was released in the US in 2014 and is scheduled for a UK release in 2015 under the title The Rendlesham UFO Incident. The film tells the story of three
metal detectors who get caught up in a UFO encounter. Directed by Daniel
Simpson (Director: Spiderhole),
the film is a co-production between LipSync Productions, Newscope Films and
Altitude Film Entertainment.Will
Clarke, Chairman and CEO of Altitude Film Entertainment, formerly CEO of
Optimum Releasing and Producer of films such as Four Lions, Attack the Block
and Brighton Rock is producing along with Jason Newmark and
Mike Runagall.

Adam has written a mini-series about Lord Nelson (Trafalgar) which was commissioned by Working Title Television.. He has also adapted the novel The Secret Hunters by Sir Ranulph Fiennes for Trinamite Productions. In addition he has written a biopic about Cornish artist Alfred Wallis (Primitive) for the Cornwall Film Fund, an original psychological thriller about characters trapped in a shrinking room (Implode) and a comedy about a female cop forced to go undercover as a man in her family’s restaurant (The Middle Child). Adam began his career in 1988 at Transatlantic Films in London where he worked as a researcher and production assistant on the 13-part documentary series Greek Fire for Channel Four. He then went to the United States where he worked as an assistant editor for the “Direct Cinema” company Maysles Films in New York. On his return to London Adam worked as production manager and a producer for Entertainment Productions, making entertainment programming and live comedy videos. Throughout his career Adam has written and directed a series of short films. Most recently Le Boast, which premiered at the World Comedy Film Festival in Toronto where it was bought by Ouat Media. It has subsequently been broadcast 10 times on the TV Channel Movieola. Other short films include Unsuitable Ties (1988), Still Life (1990) and Lady Chatterley’s Brother (1991). He has also directed theatre productions including Chekhov’s The Proposal at the Na Pradle Theatre in Prague. His short comedy Powder premiered at the Prague Playhouse Theatre. Adam has written for Sight and Sound, The Times, The Financial Times and The Times Literary Supplement. His cartoons have been published in Private Eye and The Economist. His comic novel The Peppered Moth is available both as an e-book and in paperback on Amazon.